Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All - Hardcover

Hudson, Sandy

 
9780593700815: Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593700813 ISBN 13: 9780593700815
Verlag: Pantheon, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A fiercely-argued, deeply-informed examination of why defunding the police is the only way to support a model of security and protection that increases public safety overall

Time and again history has watched as police respond to minor calls with escalation, wrongful arrests, and even murder. Reform programs are often poorly implemented and their impacts short-lived. Calls to "defund the police" have rung out across the nation, yet the actual meaning of the phrase remains unclear to many. In Defund, longtime activist and founder of Black Lives Matter Canada Sandy Hudson elucidates what it actually means to "defund the police" and why it matters, by exploring today's criminal landscape, and the patterns and structures that result in safer, well-resourced communities. 

Hudson explores the origins of commonly held ideas about police and safety to show how police-related social policies are based more on a sensationalized idea of safety, than on outcomes and data. Through interviews and sociological research, she demonstrates, for instance, that law enforcement solve only a small number of the crimes that they are tasked to investigate, and even the process of assigning cases depends more on optics than large-scale crime reduction. Conversely, safe neighborhoods, rather than featuring an increased police presence, are rich in resources and social programs.

After laying out the history and data behind our broken policing system, Hudson paves a clear path forward by exploring how communities can save both money and lives by investing in themselves rather than in policing. She shows how simple changes to educational resources, community centers, and civic engagement can not only make communities safer, but also better able to provide for their citizens in countless ways. Clear-eyed and hopeful yet pragmatic, Defund is the key to understanding why a future without police is not only entirely possible, but necessary.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sandy Hudson is a multidisciplinary creative, writer, and activist and the founder of the Black Lives Matter Canada. Sandy also co-founded the Black Legal Action Centre, a specialty legal aid clinic, which provides direct legal services and test case litigation for Black communities in Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, and the Huffington Post, among others. Sandy holds a JD from the UCLA School of Law and a Master of Arts in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. She also co-hosts the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics, and is co-author of the best-selling anthology, Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada. Sandy is currently based in Los Angeles and is co-Executive Producer of the eight-part CBC documentary series Black Life: Untold Stories, an official selection of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

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1

We’ve Been Disinformed

Like many, I grew up watching crime investigation shows. The police procedural is the lifeblood of the television entertainment industry, consistently among the most watched television shows across the world, even more popular than sports. From dramas like Law & Order, comedies like Brooklyn Nine-­Nine, and reality television like Cops, at any given time, policing is the one profession you can consistently watch a fictionalized account of on television. The sheer amount of available fictional material to consume about the police has created a sense of familiarity within pop culture about what police do, what they accomplish, and how. The Law & Order franchise, for instance, has spawned a seemingly unending plethora of spin-­offs, including Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, True Crime, Organized Crime, Hate Crimes, Conviction, Los Angeles, UK, and Toronto: Criminal Intent. On any random date in the United States, there are nearly twenty-­four hours of the Law & Order franchise available to watch on television and far more available on streaming platforms.

Across these shows, the police behave similarly, and sometimes the shared elements reflect things that are true. Yes, police wear uniforms, engage in traffic stops, and respond to emergency calls. But these programs are ultimately meant to be entertainment—­to excite us, make us emotionally invested, and keep us watching from week to week. Their purpose is not to depict the truth. And often, the how and the conclusion of these stories are largely fictionalized. Violence, harm, and threats to safety are complicated issues that cannot be explained, let alone resolved, in a television hour. As a lawyer, I can tell you that televised legal serials make practicing law seem far more thrilling than it actually is. The same is true for policing.

Because of how often we see the police on our screens, whether in fiction or on the news, we all feel knowledgeable about who they are and what they do—­whether we have an expert level of knowledge or not. In some ways, the ownership we collectively feel over the police is a good thing. Like any public service, ordinary people should be able to contribute to the examination, critique, and transformation of community safety and security, much like we can with education, health care, or other public services. What makes public safety distinct from these other services is the level of interaction the population has with its primary providers—­police officers. To understand what I mean, let’s consider another public service: education.

When I was a child, my parents were deeply involved in supporting my education. My mother would order the curricula set by the provincial government before the beginning of the school year so she was clear on the expectations for me and my siblings. She would buttress the curriculum with additional educational material she would find on her own, and both she and my father would stay in constant communication with our teachers to get updates on our progress and volunteer in our classrooms or on field trips, even challenging instructors they found inadequate.

While my parents might have been more intimately in­volved than your average parent, it’s simply a fact that most of us have had some sort of interaction with public schools: In the United States and Canada, 91 percent of children enrolled in elementary and secondary school attend public schools, while 93 percent do so in the U.K. As such, whether through our own experience or by way of our family members, we each have an experiential level of knowledge about how public schooling works. We have opinions about everything, from teaching strategies, curricula, and class sizes to how evaluation should work, extracurricular activities, and homework. The average person’s experiential knowledge can be a valuable contribution to the expert knowledge of service providers (teachers, principals, and other education workers), those working to analyze the education system (researchers and education scholars), direct service users (students and parents), and policy makers (politicians and bureaucrats). Collaboration among these groups creates the opportunity for meaningful conversations about the future of public education systems.

In contrast, most people have no exposure to police officers, our primary recourse for public safety. Only a targeted few—­primarily Black, Indigenous, disabled, and poor populations—­have consistent and repeated experiences with police in their day-­to-­day lives. In 2018, less than 25 percent of people in the United States had any contact with police. A 2003 study of people living in London, England, found that 80 percent of Londoners primarily got their information about the police from the news media. Word of mouth was the second-­largest source of information about the police at 49 percent, and a staggering 29 percent cited media fiction as their primary source. Only 20 percent cited direct experience with police as their primary source of information. Similar data does not exist for Canada, but we do know that there are far fewer police per capita in Canada than in the United States, which suggests there would be less opportunity for police contact with people in Canada. This is not data over the lifetime of an individual, so it isn’t telling us how many of us will ever interact with police, and it’s not telling us what the level or nature of that interaction was. But what this data does tell us is that despite how strongly we may feel about the police one way or another, for the vast majority, our understanding of police is not born of experience or firsthand knowledge. For many, our understanding of police comes from what we have been told.

Television shows perpetuate a powerful pervading belief about the world we live in: Police officers are heroes. Characters on police procedurals are rarely complex, and the innocent victim, evil villain, and courageous heroes are quickly identifiable. The design of the shows leads viewers to relate most strongly with the histories and principles of the law enforcement characters. This is accomplished in several ways, but one of the most crucial is simply exposure. The police characters are limited in number but recur frequently on-­screen. We get to know their complexities and motivations. The villainous criminals, in contrast, are rarely recurring and do not have complex storylines. They are one-­dimensional bad guys. This framing is consistently presented in television shows, in blockbuster films, and even in elementary school assemblies, where children are taught about the dangers of crimes or drugs, typically by the “hero” police officers themselves. The story is repeated so many times it’s difficult to accept narratives that contradict it. That is why so many of us feel disturbed when we hear an idea like “defund” or “abolish” the police. It seems taboo; police are the “good guys,” the prevailing narrative tells us. Without them, the “bad guys” will harm us.

As a result of this programming, our public safety conversations are stunted—­our opinions driven by assumptions rather than reality and our discussions starting and ending with policing. Rarely are we discussing the totality of tools available to create safer, more secure communities, or to prevent harm from happening. From a young age, we are told we need to remember only three numbers, and we will be provided with immediate, personalized, professional assistance. This information is so effectively and repeatedly drilled into our heads that for many of us it has become an impenetrable truth.

The problem is that these stories of heroism are...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593700813
ISBN 13 
9780593700815
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
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